"Linux has proven amazingly flexible: after nearly 10 years of use, I'm still impressed by how the Linux operating system does exactly what I want on any type of hardware. Desktop customization is no exception; from the ultra-modern KDE and GNOME window managers to with the likes of Fluxbox and AfterStep, there's a Linux desktop to suit everyone."

Um the same can be said if you use a Linux magazine. Not everything has to be compiled from source. You can usually find packages straight from the devs in whatever popular format your distro uses. There are only really three formats with varying degrees of compatibility. There is RPM, DEB, and TGZ as the major ones. One of them is just a plain old archive format, the others are a little more complex but there are many distros that use them as their basis. Windows has the luxury of only coming form one source and so MS controls how things are packaged across the OS.

There is no reason whatsoever that full compiled app can't be distributed in a tgz file. In fact most games on Linux are packaged this way, with very little to no dependencies at all to deal with. The reason Linux uses package managers is two-fold, due to the way most apps in Linux share libraries. Library files are usually packaged separately.

1. This reduces memory usage and footprint since many apps can use the same lib without having to install their own version like most installers do in Windows.

2. Security, because each lib is its own entity and package. updating errors in a lib or a security flaw is trivial. You usually don't have to reinstall the apps that use the libs at all, only the libs are affected.

Now, memory footprint isn't really an issue with the amount of ram most people have to spare nowadays. But the security issue is important, as well as having to download 80MB-100MB packages just to update a lib, like you have to do with Windows and OSX. Most Linux packages are usually only 20MB at the most in size, and thats monsters like OO.o. But for the most part installing apps, many apps, in most Linux distro would surprise you at how little the download sizes are.